Will Biden lift trade tariffs on China?

PRESIDENT Joe Biden entered office pledging to promote a series of policy initiatives on the domestic and foreign policy fronts that reflected the growing power of the progressive wing of his party, ranging from spending trillions of US dollars on major social-economic programmes and an ambitious plan to combat climate change to reversing US trade liberalisation policies and replacing them with a protectionist agenda.

Some of these plans, like the “Build Back Better” programme, were dead on arrival due to the opposition on Capitol Hill; others seem to be losing steam as the Biden administration confronts geo-economic and geo-strategic realities that are different from those that existed two years earlier.

More specifically, as the threat of growing inflation has risen to the top of the administration’s agenda, and has become more acute in the face of escalating energy and commodity prices resulting from the Ukraine War, the president and his aides are having no choice but to reassess their earlier priorities.